There is a regular, metronomic, metallic THUNK coming from the studio. Every two seconds, a drop of water falls from the ceiling and lands in the bucket on the floor where the corner of my drawing table used to be.

A half hour ago, Nick crawled out of bed. I stayed. I wasn’t ready to get up. Then I heard him saying “Um, Peggy? We have an emergency.” And I got up. And slightly freaked out. But managed to coordinate moving everything out of the way – first a pot went beneath the leak, then we moved the computer desk that’s about three feet to the right of the leak, then I got the stuff piled beneath the drawing board out of the way and finally we moved the board itself.

And then I remembered that I have a huge bucket in the closet for cleaning and I put that on the floor instead of the pot.

A few things got wet. Luckily most of what was under there was a pile of old test prints on thick paper, and a few pieces of Bristol board in a thick card envelope. There may be a couple drawings lost, but nothing really important.

I wonder how long it’ll take for this one to get fixed. The last leak was maybe a week or two, what with all the time it took them to figure out that it was a leak on the top floor running down the walls into my kitchen. I’m just really glad Nick cleaned up some of the stuff in that area yesterday while we were starting the process of him moving in.

Rita’s being finally shipped, Nick’s moving in. And maybe now we’ll push “finding a 3br place to share” up the schedule a little bit, depending on how this pans out. Really there was enough change in my life going on already, I didn’t need this extra crisis. But here it is and it’s been as dealt with as much as possible for now.

So not too long after I wrote this, the landlord showed up and took a look. He investigated upstairs; apparently my upstairs neighbor’s hot water heater sprung a leak. One more crisis dealt with. On to the next one.